To get in touch please send an email here david@setr.co.uk or have a look at my LinkedIn profile to see if I have the skills you're looking for. I recently started adding things to my github.
If you're not quite ready to hire me, but still want to stalk me online for a while you can have a look at my instagram 👀
We designed and wrote an application in python that listens to the twitter streaming API. It works out when it needs to search for images and what to search for. It ran during the superbowl and handled around 1mil tweets. It has been patented and it has won awards.
If I ever work on a better project, with better team-mates, for a better client, I've won the internet.
Some of the most fun and innovative programming and process techniques went into this project. Here we are discussing how the Social Listenerâ„¢ (patented) will post (and award winning) pictures in real-time during events like the Superbowl.
This a super early version of the system listening to a simulated stream of tweets coming out of MongoDB. The data is a Champions League game between Barcelona and Celtic.
Across the bottom the tweets are recorded by a Listener and their keyword scores are saved into Redis. Then right to left across the top a Monitor is keeping track of active searches in the system and when it should have a look at the data. It fires signals to an Analyzer that will create tables of keyword scoreboards and then decide what to search for. Tasks are then sent to Gearman to search an image database and post the results to various different social channels.
BFI Player is the revamped video rental site for the BFI using the our in-house VoD platform Skylark. I lead the team developing the player site and the Skylark platform through to delivery.
Architecture-wise the site is a python/django website using a python/django based API. Both are served behind their own infrastructure on AWS. Static assets are served via S3 with videos coming from the OVP’s CDN.
Entitlements and eCommerce transactions and 3rd party synchronisation is handled using a RabbitMq server with dedicated workers for each of the concerns.
Ballball is NewsCorp's companion to the Sun Goals, feeding in match highlight videos to multiple regions in South East Asia. It is available as a responsive website and also an Android app.
The project was very much run as an agile project and immediately after the release I was responsible for managing the development of new features for the site and app.
Ballball is developed entirely in django. Within the codebase there is read/write API serving the data to the site and the app and also ingesting stats and videos from Opta and Fox Australia respectively.
On a match day, Ballball processes 11k match update transactions from Opta and 3Gb of data within a space of 3 hours. This includes video highlights, scores and standings from the top 5 leagues in Europe.
Skylark is our video content curation system, it sits neatly in front of a lot of industry OVPs who are very good at creating video transcoding pipelines, but are less interested in serving the content to the user in a meaningful way on a platform such as Netflix or iPlayer.
Skylark gave us as a company the ability to create bespoke VoD solutions for all sorts of clients and since we were already VoD specialists as a UX company, suddenly gave us a technical USP over our competitors.
At its core it's a django-package that is included into client django projects, providing a core set of functionality which can then be overriden on a client basis. It provides a read/write API and connectors to 3rd party services for data ingest and synchronisation with all sorts of things like eCommerce providers, OVPs and client data sources.
A good demonstration of Skylark's flexibility as a platform are the two live sites built on top of it. Currently there is BFI Player which is a front-end built with Django and Alchemiya which has been built using AngularJS.
This was such a great project for a lot of reasons. It was the 1st time I lead a team properly (with some absolutely awesome mentoring from the senior tech folks at R/GA)
we developed a mobile-first responsive website that encouraged teens to share their favourite trainers out to various social platforms and get rewarded for it. We were able to use some awesome tech like Redis to track the scoreboards we were maintaining and it ws one of the first projects in the R/GA London office to try kanban.
So, we made a talking PingPong table that managed a player waiting list. you texted it when you wanted to play and it picked the next to people in line for a game.
It was completely automated and used more libraries and gadets than I have digits on my hands and feet. Our 3 minute presentation was a list of pronouns which were the names of all the involved technologies.
The ones I can remember are twilio, makeymakey, raspberry pi? (as a server), redis (as a queue), python/fabric and C-C-C-Code Igniter (I think this is the last time I’ve used Code Igniter).